Thoughts
Reflections on a World at the Crossroads
An Essay on finding meaning in this post meaning world
My son and his girlfriend for over a year tried to compel me to come onto Medium and write articles and post my stories and poetry. I finally acquiesced and began to put stories and poetry on the site. This is all new to me. Writing had always been a hobby for me, something I did to occupy my mind while I commuted to my insurance job on Wall Street every day. In 2008 I published my first novel VISIONARY with a small publisher in California. My second novel, THE OMEGA CONSPIRACY was published as an ebook in 2013. I lost that insurance job in 2015 in a reorganisation and for a time began to write full-time. I went to work for a law firm in 2020 and then Covid came.
They have recently been pressuring me to write essays, some extraordinary pieces of writing that will go viral and finally get me noticed by the literati. I have written a few essays in my life for college, but essays are not my forte. For several days I have been fighting this impulse to write an essay, but I have finally found the courage within me to put these heartfelt words on paper. This is my first attempt at this sort of essay. This is for you my offspring.
Anyone with any eyes to see realises the world is in a mess, this world is at a crossroads which could very well lead to its destruction.
Inflation has never been higher. There’s a stupid war going on in Ukraine, which the rest of the world condemns and which the Russian religious leaders have declared a holy war and I feel I am living in a dark version of every dark horror film we have ever watched. It makes Dr Strangelove seem reasonable.
I have always been a quiet person, primarily, interested in putting my ideas on paper than shouting them from a tower for everyone to hear. I have crafted delicate and complex relational stories about making a better world, many with a supernatural sci-fi bent. I never had these grand ideas of becoming some kind of prophet intoning in what direction we as a species might go, but I can see clearly where we are going, like lemmings jumping off a cliff, our civilisation seems determined to destroy itself like so many other civilisations before us. I was watching a YouTube video yesterday about ancient Rome and its ruins. This once powerful empire with its impressive stone structures is no more. Aside from a few standing buildings, 50,000 miles of Roman roads, and 300 bridges, almost all of that civilisation has disappeared. That we could be surrounded by so many ruins of other failed civilizations and still believe in incremental progress, seems completely absurd. Civilizations have destroyed themselves in the past and we could do so now, even with all our advances in technology and so-called enlightened ideas. It could be argued that with the nuclear technology we now possess, it could be much easier for us to destroy ourselves, and because of comments by the Russian leadership about the use of nuclear weapons, it could easily escalate now.
How many movies have been made or books have been written about just such an outcome? Mad Max, The Terminator Franchise, Planet of The Apes, among many others. Mine was a generation raised in the shadow of the cold war, where drills were regularly performed for just such an outcome. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we all thought this was over. But today it sometimes seems we are on the threshold of it all over again.
One of my pet peeves about all these discussions about modern cultures concerns this widely held belief that human beings are basically good. This is an idea that goes back to Plato’s Republic, that human beings don’t do the good because they don’t know the good, and if they knew the good they would do it. This old idea is at the heart of all modern humanistic philosophies. Just tell people the right thing to do and they’ll do it. Ask the citizens of Los Angeles and other large cities, with their high crime rates, how this idea has worked out for them. I was beaten every day in elementary school by bigger boys, not because they didn’t know the good but because they enjoyed doing the bad. Our new philosophy in this post-modern world is that we cannot know the good, which makes everything humans do good by definition. We live in a time when there is no general consensus on what the good actually is.
This is not a blanket critique of humanistic ideas. The so-called Christian world has its own share of hypocrisies. How many wars have been fought by Christians against other Christians? How many years did slavery stain the western world? Look at the appalling record of racial prejudice in western nations. The one small solace in my life is that many of my ancestors were Quakers and Baptists who opposed slavery and were abolitionists. I know it can be argued, and many have, that Christianity made the world better. It propagated the idea of individual dignity, human rights, and the care of the poor. But it was unsuccessful at eradicating the inborn human impulse to kill one another. We have many wars and murders to demonstrate this impulse is alive and well, and now Orthodox Christians are killing each other in Ukraine. Happy Easter! I understand deeply why the western world has abandoned Christianity. But I see no evidence that what they propose to replace it with is much better. I am in deep sympathy with the idea of making a better world and finding more compassionate ways to live with one another. Everything I have written for the last 20 years concerns this subject. But I recognise we must first change the human heart before we can remake our world. Unfortunately, this leads to my next critique
Anyone who looks honestly at the last 20 years can’t help but see the dramatic devolution in our culture, in everything from music to movies, to the arts, to the tenor of interactions between those of opposing political camps, everyone has become hostile to differing opinions, and people are more divided now than when I was a child. I don’t see this getting better but worse. I’ve never considered myself a political person. I found myself changing opinions many times in my life. I learn more and I reconsider my positions. I don’t have the hubris to believe that I hold absolute truth about anything. Anyone who reads my stories will see that all of my protagonists have opposing opinions. The purpose of my writing has been for me and my readers to explore those different opinions. I am the first to admit I am not perfect.
That’s why I would find it difficult to write polemical essays, to be a propagandist for any position whatsoever, except one, the old biblical adage, “Love thy neighbour.” As long as I am able to put a word to paper, I want to be a venue for honest discussion. I find the controversy, the give and take, stimulating. The advocacy that I promote is to encourage people to be their best selves in freedom, to live for others first, to care for the poor and downtrodden, and to embrace the diversity that indwells our very DNA. We are all finally one family, one race, the human race, with many different expressions of what it means to be human. For once let us embrace that truth. Thank You!